This is a blog about economics, history, law and other things that interest me.

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Round table on Edward Baptist's Half has Never Been Told

The September Journal of
Economic History has a round table of reviews of Edward Baptist’s book The Half Has Never Been told, with
reviews by Alan Olmstead, Jonathan Pritchett, Trevon Logan and Peter Rousseau. They
each address different aspects of the way that Baptist misrepresents the
historiography of American slavery and makes things up. Thanks to Alan Olmstead
for mentioning one of my
blog posts on the book. Many of the points noted in these reviews are similar to ones that I and Pseudoerasmus
made about the book shortly after it came out, around the same time it was
getting glowing reviews in places like the New York Times Book Reviews. I found
Logan’s review particularly interesting when it stepped away from what is
typically thought of as economic history. He concludes

I think as an economic historian I was so offended by the
books portrayal of economic historians I may have missed some of the bigger
problems.